Tuesday, June 30, 1998 Last modified at 1:40 a.m. on Tuesday, June 30, 1998

Music group Backstreet Boys on front lines of teen music

Associated Press

NEW YORK - It's Aug. 12, 1997 - D-Day for the release of the Backstreet Boys' self-titled debut LP.

But in reality, it's the final phase of their worldwide plan to drive every teen-age girl on the planet mad with puppy love.

The place: the Virgin Megastore in Times Square. It's packed by the advance guard of the group's emerging following - girls able to sniff the scent of Major Cute Boys from the flimsiest of evidence: a few pictures of the group peppering teen magazines, a smidgen of radio play from Z-100 for their first single and the faint screams of foreign girls echoing down from Canada, where the group already rules.

Maybe we all are - but not for the reason she thinks. A massive crush of pigtailed, yelping girls - and me! - press toward the store's fourth-floor plexiglass barrier, threatening to burst through and plunge everybody 100 feet down. Luckily, Virgin and the band's bodyguards thought to employ more security people than normally shield the president - and a lemming-like descent into mass death is averted.

All is calm ...

Until the Boys themselves show up to sing even-flatter-than-you'd-expect vocals to some better-than-you'd-think pretaped musical tracks. It isn't one of their better performances - not that any of their fans notice - but it's greeted with such hysterical shrieking that every eardrum in new-and-improved Times Square is in peril.

And this was just the beginning!

In the 10 months since this key moment in pop, the Backstreet Boys' brand of bubblegum R&B, as played on their debut LP, has outsold the Spice Girls' second album by some 700,000 copies - but without equivalent media hysteria. By moving 3.6 million platters, "The Backstreet Boys" has become the third-biggest album of the year so far, after the "Titanic" soundtrack and Celine Dion's "Let's Talk About Love." They've also scored three Top Five hits: "Quit Playing Games (With My Heart)," "As Long As You Love Me" and "Everybody (Backstreet's Back)."

Likewise, the Boys' concert tour this summer has moved more tickets in the New York area than Les Gals' infinitely more-hyped shows, with 42,000 tickets sold to the Girls' 35,000. And the week their home video came out, the Boys sold twice as many as the Girls did with theirs.

But does the mainstream press take notice? Hardly. Could it be sexism on the part of male editors, favoring busty girls to beefy boys? The Backstreet kids are too polite, or too well coached, to complain about the Girls' fame. In fact, they say they prefer their relatively low-key road to success.

"I think it's kinda cool, our way," says 18-year-old Nick Carter, the blondest, youngest, girliest - and therefore, most popular - member of the fivesome. "This is like an underground thing, sneaking up on you. When the Spice Girls came over, it was like, boom! Big single, TV, everything."

Kevin Richardson, 26, the long-haired and most serious Boy, feels their quieter attack could well prove a commercial advantage. "When you're in the limelight and everyone's talking about you every day, they get sick of you. We don't want to oversaturate ourselves."

"We're more mysterious," adds Alexander James "A.J." McLean, 21, the group's designated wildman, sex machine and quasi-home Boy. "We're not trying to be one of these super-merchandised groups. We may have the occasional keychain on the market, but not dolls and pillows."

In fact, the group does have pillows, up for sale right on the back cover of their LP - "100 percent cotton, poly-filled, approximately 13" square, $12.98" - along with 10 kinds of T-shirts, hats, bandanas, keychains and nearly a dozen posters with group and individual shots, suitable for framing.

It shouldn't come as a surprise. After all, the Boys learned from the teen-sales masters. Though they're shy about the connection, the band is managed by some of the same people associated with their closest predecessors, The New Kids On The Block. While the Boys started out on their own in their native Orlando, Fla., they came to prominence thanks to Johnny Wright. For four years, he was the New Kids' road manager, and had learned how to shape a teen act from the Kids' guru, promoter Maurice Starr.